• The policies that had been set related to the project as a whole, and in order to keep that focus no attention whatever had been given to the actual implementation of any of the more than 115 different projects and programmes that would comprise the iSLP.
• The implementation process that had been agreed upon as part of the iSLP Principles required community involvement in each project from the conceptual stage. Any preliminary planning would have preempted this and threatened the integrity of the project.
• The national housing policy had not yet been published, and there was not yet clarity about what could be financed in the housing field using public funds.
• There was no clarity regarding the availability of committed finance on anything other than a year-by-year basis. It was only after the installation of the new government and the publication of its Reconstruction and Development Programme in mid-1994 that the possibility of obtaining committed finance for a number of years became evident.
• The project only achieved its enhanced "integrated" status in December 1994. Until that time it only had a housing component.

The first step in implementation was to create enough capacity within the Project Coordination function to activate community participation so that project planning could commence.

The Implementation Phase began with the establishment of Residents’ Development Committees (RDCs) in each of the 30 participating communities. The name had been suggested by community participation specialists from the UN Habitat office in Nairobi, who reviewed the project early in 1994 and commented that it was the most complex large housing project that they had ever come across - on account of so many role-players and competitors in such an historically volatile area, seeking to implement a project within such a changing and uncertain environment.

A little capacity-building was provided to some of the RDCs, but this was quickly overtaken by real on-the-job capacity building as the planning process began for the first two big housing projects - Weltevreden Valley and Southern Delft early in 1994. All the communities had the opportunity to be involved in these projects, and they therefore provided a valuable start to the community participation process in the iSLP.

1994 was full of community consultation, including a great deal of effort to persuade the leadership of some informal settlements, who had hitherto controlled the allocation of resources in those areas, to join an inclusive, participative process that contained safeguards against corruption. Success was very limited initially.

From early 1995 implementation of the iSLP, particularly by Provincial departments, accelerated across a broad front. Project Committees formed for housing projects became the core community structures to which all project and programme proposals for an area were referred. Those involved were required to learn at a fast rate, and became real assets in the whole development process.

In local government, the first elections for another interim local government structure took place in mid-1996. Before that date there was no committed capacity within local government structures to implement the iSLP, and after the election it would still be two years before the reconstituted institutions of local government had the ability to play a significant role in implementation. As an alternative, however, a number of local government politicians (and some officials) focussed their attention on denigrating what had so far been achieved and on challenging some of the long-standing principles and structures in the project. Part of the motivation was party politics - the Province and the City of Cape Town were controlled by opposing parties and in the City of Tygerberg control was very evenly balanced between the two parties. Part of it was a lack of appreciation of the human settlement development process and of the history and integrity of the consultative process employed in the iSLP. More information on these issues is provided under Housing, within Threats to the Project.